President Trump is Right about U.S. Warship Design

President Trump recently offered a critique of U.S. warship design, saying that our surface combatants — cruisers, destroyers and frigates — are too small. These ship types make up the bulk of most navies, so the problem is not limited to the U.S. Navy’s surface combatants.

Each packs a vast amount of electronics and weapons magazines into a single, largely or wholly unarmored hull, i.e., the ship is a one-egg basket. In battle, a single hit will likely result in a mission kill, meaning the ship will no longer be able to fight until it returns to a dockyard for repairs. If a ship cannot take hits and keep on fighting, it’s really not a warship at all.

There is an alternative to current surface combatant design, one I have been writing about since the 1990s including in the book I co-authored with Senator Gary Hart, America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform. We proposed that future surface combatants have large hulls built to merchant ship standards. Merchant ship tonnage is cheap. In peacetime, most of these ships would be hauling cargo, thereby rebuilding our merchant marine. They would be fitted with standardized receptacles for modular weapons and sensors, and both the ships and the crews would belong to the Naval Reserve. When they were needed as warships, the weapons and sensors, also with Naval Reserve crews, would be plugged into the ship. The bulk of the remaining tonnage would be temporarily filled with something fireproof that floats. The sides and upper deck would be filled with water to serve as armor against the shaped-charge warheads which most anti-ship missiles carry (the water breaks up the warhead’s jet). These would be true warships, able to take hits and keep on fighting.

So why do we keep building ships that cannot survive hits? Because they fit the “greyhounds of the sea” image that admirals want. This is yet another example of the fact that we don’t have war-fighting services; we have four well-funded clubs for World War I re-enactors. The same is true in other navies.

The modularization of naval sensors and weapons is well-proven. Since the 1980s the German Blohm & Voss shipyard has offered its MEKO surface combatants on the world market. When I was still Senate staff, a representative of the shipyard told me that, just to see if it could be done, they reconfigured a ship from Anti-Air Warfare to Anti-Submarine Warfare in 48 hours.

If they can plug their weapons and sensors into small, vulnerable “warship” hulls, they can do so in the much larger and more robust merchant ship hull I am proposing. Recent history gives credibility to what I am proposing. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq was launching anti-ship missiles at tankers in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. sent some frigates to escort the tankers. But the tankers ended up escorting the frigates because the tankers could take hits and keep going, and the frigates could not.

I hope President Trump sticks to his guns on this issue. The Navy will try to slow-walk it until he leaves office. It knows that delay is the surest form of denial. To make it happen, he should set up a design bureau for the new ship type that is independent from the Navy. I know some people who would be competent to man such a design bureau. The designs it would come up with could save both taxpayers’ money and American sailors’ lives.